Comment by submeta
7 days ago
They should not, and they cannot. Doing therapy can be a long process where the therapist tries to help you understand your reality, view a certain aspect of your life in a different way, frame it differently, try to connect dots between events and results in your life, or tries to help you heal, by slowly approaching certain topics or events in your life, daring to look into that direction, and in that process have room for mourning, and so much more.
All of this can take months or years of therapy. Nothing that a session with an LLM can accomplish. Why? Because LLMs won’t read between lines, ask you uncomfortable questions, have a plan for weeks, months and years, make appointments with you, or steer the conversation into totally different ways if necessary. And it won‘t sit in front of you, give you room to cry, contain your pain, give you a tissue, give you room for your emotions, thoughts, stories.
Therapy is a complex interaction between human beings, a relationship, not the process of asking you questions, and getting answers from a bot. It’s the other way around.
In Germany, if you're not suicidal or in imminent danger, you'll have to wait anywhere from several months to several years for a longterm therapy slot*. There are lots of people that would benefit from having someone—something—to talk to right now instead of waiting.
* unless you're able to cover for it yourself, which is prohibitively expensive for most of the population.
But a sufficiently advanced LLM could do all of those things, and furthermore it could do it at a fraction of the cost with 24/7 availability. A not-bad therapist you can talk to _right now_ is better than one which you might get 30 minutes with in a month, if you have the money.
Is a mid-2025 off-the-shelf LLM great at this? No.
But it is pretty good, and it's not going to stop improving. The set of human problems that an LLM can effectively help with is only going to grow.
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